SANA, Yemen — Thousands of people have fled a village in southern Yemen where security forces are laying siege to al-Qaeda militants, a security official said Monday, signaling an escalation in the government’s U.S.-backed campaign to uproot the terror network’s local offshoot.

Government forces have moved into the village of Hawta with tanks and armored vehicles, and 90 percent of its residents have fled, said Abdullah Baouda, police chief for the surrounding district.

Forces have shelled the village indiscriminately and fired on vehicles of fleeing residents, according to local government and medical officials.

Hawta is in Yemen’s mountainous Shabwa province, one of the areas where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has taken root over the past year and a half beyond the reach of a weak central government that has little control beyond the capital.

The United States is deeply concerned about the threat from Yemen’s al-Qaeda branch. The group claimed responsibility for the December attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, linking the plot to Yemen’s cooperation with the U.S. military in strikes on al-Qaeda targets.

Yemen is the poorest nation in the Arab world and is beset by other major internal security threats — an on-and-off rebellion in the north and a separate secessionist movement in the south.

President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, visited Yemen on Monday for talks with President Ali Abdullah Saleh and other senior officials.

Today, one out of every three men imprisoned in Colorado -- and four out of every five women inmates -- say they have some type of moderate to critical mental health need, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections. The number of inmates with mental health needs in Colorado's prisons has steadily risen in the past two decades.

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